Resource Type: Tips & How-Tos

When times are tough, we stick together. In pandemics or power outages, after hurricanes or snow storms, we do better when we care for one another. No matter our race, income, zip code, faith, or gender, we want our families to be healthy and thrive for generations to come.
For as long as we can remember, a handful of politicians in our country have tried to divide us and lie about the damage to our climate and communities. They want to point fingers, assign blame, and turn us against each other while oil companies profit off of polluting our air, land, and water. Black, brown, or white, Indigenous, or immigrant – we aren’t going to fall for it.
The record-breaking number of voters in the 2020 election signals the growing wave of people who are ready and willing to shape the direction of our nation. On climate, a large majority of the American public understands climate change is happening and that we must do something about it – a prerequisite to building a successful, winning movement*.The greatest opportunity and challenge ahead of us is translating that momentum and support into widespread action for movement solutions. Because voting isn’t the end of engagement and public opinion data is merely statistics if not translated into sustained action.
The climate crisis will continue to shape our lives and political landscape. In these moments of crisis (think about the COVID-19 pandemic for example), new narratives, new policies, and new social behaviors are established. This is why how we act and what we say in these moments is critical because there’s a small window of persuasion before people’s attention moves on.
Race Class Narrative is an empirically-tested narrative framework that breaks through the noise of our opposition, unites people across races, backgrounds, and genders, and communicates solutions in a way that makes them obvious, achievable, and worth fighting for.
Thank you to Tinselyn Simms and Eleonore Wesserle of We Make the Future, Anthony Torres of ASO Communications, and the whole team at 100% MN for being bold practitioners of Race Class Narrative (+ Race Class Gender Narrative) and contributing to this insight.

On Thursday, September 15, the Climate Advocacy Lab hosted the second training in our North East Training Arc, Elements of a successful campaign strategy. This training focused on the importance of building a strong campaign strategy, understanding the componants that makeup a strategy that builds power, and looked at case studies of campaigns that we can learn from to bring key strategic vision to our organizations and communities. 
 

I write to you from my AC-less apartment, with my windows wide open and hoping for a breeze. The west coast is experiencing another record-breaking heat wave and while I’m spared from the worst of it in typically cooler San Francisco, the Bay Area is being scorched, fueling several fast-moving wildfires. At the same time, an unimaginable one-third of Pakistan is currently underwater due to catastrophic flooding, displacing 33 million people. Extreme flooding and record droughts contributed to Jackson, Mississippi, a predominantly-Black city, losing access to safe drinking water. Both examples and realities continue to show how climate change disproportionately impacts people of color and those who have contributed the least to warming. Within this context, it feels timely to refresh ourselves on everything we know about extreme weather and public engagement as we work to engage our communities and audiences on climate action in these extreme times (You can find our last deep dive on this from 2020*).

This workshop on combating apathy and powerlessness for the RE-AMP Network’s current peer learning circle covered what social science is telling us about the root causes of apathy and ways to move people toward hope, and how to combat sentiments among supporters like “My actions don’t matter.”        

The Lab hosted the first training in our Narrative and Communications Training Arc. The Developing Your Narrative Strategy training will focus on defining why a narrative is so important for change and what role it plays in the movement, how to develop a narrative strategy for yourself and your organization, and make space to think through how we can bring back these learnings to your organization to grow your collective narrative! This session provided an overview of narrative work and allowed for members to connect via breakout rooms. Join our future sessions to continue strengthening your evidence-based work.